If the author of Pride and Prejudice could survive a brush-up with Rudyard Kipling’s imperialism, so too will her reputation outlast the fascination of far-right reactionaries.

Is Jane Austen an icon of America’s white-supremacist alliance? That was the startling assertion made in the Chronicle of Higher Education by Nicole Wright, an assistant professor of English at the University of Colorado. Wright noted that Austen’s name had popped up in several alt-right websites, leading her to surmise that these groups were enamored of the rector’s brilliant spinster daughter, because to them she was a “symbol of sexual purity” and “standard-bearer of a vanished white traditional culture.”

Essentially, white nationalists see Austen’s pastoral, white, Christian world with its parsons, picnics, debutantes, and redcoats as a validation of their ideology of a racially pure ethno-state where women know their place and immigrants aren’t welcome. They want to Make America Austen Again, never mind that it never was.

The whole connection seems belabored, and the Austen references Wright cites from alt-right websites are too random to sustain any substantial commentary on Austen and her reactionary readers. Nevertheless, the mere idea of the boys at Breitbart palling with Austen was enough to give liberal Janeites an attack of the vapors.

But hold those smelling salts—and the outrage. This is not the first time that reactionaries have sung hosannas to Austen, nor will it be the last. Who can forget that one of her most famous admirers was the arch-imperialist Rudyard Kipling? “Glory, love, and honor unto England’s Jane!” he wrote, in a verse aglow with warm national pride.

Kipling, of course, is far too complex, compassionate, and protean a writer to be reduced to an alt-rightist. But there can be no doubt that his imperialist and racial views shaded in that direction. Kipling’s name and poems pop up on alt-right forums with far more frequency than Austen’s. Which is unsurprising given that his lifelong cri de coeur was the White Man’s civilizing mission, a cause he continued to stubbornly champion long after it had become embarrassingly unfashionable to do so. After the First World War, as his reputation declined thanks to his deranged anti-Hun propaganda—he demanded that Germans be referred to as “it” and not “he” or “they”—he became the target of liberal lampoon and was disparaged as a bitter reactionary out of touch with the changing times.

How ironic, then, that it was during this most illiberal phase of his life that this “jingo imperialist,” to use Orwell’s phrase, wrote a short story that popularized the term “Janeite,” coined by his friend, the revered critic George Saintsbury, as a handy label for what he called “the sect” of Jane Austen fans. Saintsbury, a brilliant scholar and vinophile, was a high Anglican and arch-conservative who categorically railed against progressive political reforms, from universal franchise to Catholic Emancipation to pay raises for window cleaners. Orwell remarked of his belligerence that “it takes a lot of guts to be openly such a skunk as that.” But since Saintsbury invented the term “Janeite” and Kipling magnified it, every Austen fan who embraces the moniker today owes these two men a debt of gratitude.

Indeed, it was Kipling’s short story The Janeites, a tour de force of comic pathos, that came to mind when I read Wright’s article; or, rather, when I saw the waggish illustration accompanying it, of Austen sporting an improbable bonnet: a red Make America Great Again baseball cap. (The cap on its own, without the slogan, is an especially fitting accessory, since Austen actually mentions “base-ball” in Northanger Abbey as one of the games played by her tomboy heroine Catherine Moreland.) Kipling’s titular Janeites are an equally improbable bunch: a group of hard-talking soldiers hunkered down in the muddy, rodent-infested trenches of World War I. There are five Janeites in all, most of whom aren’t particularly respectful of, or well-disposed to, women. Today, they’d almost certainly be called misogynists. The only woman whom they “say a good word for,” says the newbie Janeite, Humberstall, is “this Jane.”

The simple-minded Humberstall, who works as a mess waiter in the trenches, is the protagonist of the story and a quintessential Kipling hero: a conscientious, brave, and unsophisticated English soldier with a spit-and-polish work ethic, a patriot ready to die for flag and comrade. As it turns out, he is the only Janeite to survive; the other four are killed in a massive bombardment that destroys the Battery. We meet Humberstall after the war, when he has returned to his civilian job as a London hairdresser. Strong as an ox but with his mental faculties impaired by the war, he is an enormous man with “bewildered eyes.” It is Humberstall who relates, in thick and often impenetrable cockney—Kipling was infuriatingly fond of idiolect—how, despite his low rank, he had been inducted into a “secret society” of Janeites comprising his senior officers. In actuality there was no secret society (just a group of ardent Austen aficionados), but Humberstall was conned into believing one existed. They even had a password, he says: “Tilniz an trapdoors,” which Janeites will recognize as “Tilneys and trap-doors” from Northanger Abbey. Being part of this select fellowship was a source of immense pride to him and the highpoint of his war experience. “It was a ’appy little Group. I wouldn’t ’a changed with any other,” he says, invoking the happy ghost of Henry V’s band of brothers at the Battle of Agincourt.

With the war over, he finds himself returning nostalgically to “all her six books now for pleasure.” But, he grouses, becoming a Janeite wasn’t easy. He had to read all her novels—no easy task for someone like him. Initially, he found it difficult to understand why these officers were obsessed by “a little old maid ’oo’d written ’alf a dozen books about a hundred years ago.” Even worse, her quiet novels “weren’t adventurous, nor smutty, nor what you’d call even interestin’.” Nor were her characters particularly exciting.

Humberstall can’t spell (“Lady Catherine de Bugg”) or remember the names of characters or novel titles. Anne Elliot and Captain Wentworth of Persuasion are “Miss What’s-her Name” and “Captain T’other Bloke,” and Northanger Abbey is “some Abbey or other.” When one of the Janeites declares that Austen didn’t die barren but produced a lawful issue named “’Enery James,” he believes the novelist is her son. But Austen could not have asked for a more perceptive and loyal reader. He unwittingly pays her a tremendous compliment when he observes that her unexciting characters from a hundred years ago are just like people he comes across every day. The oily Reverend Collins from Pride and Prejudice, “always on the make an’ lookin’ to marry money,” reminds him of the troop-leader from his Boy Scout years. He could swear that the wholesale grocer’s imperious wife is the “duplicate” of “Lady Catherine de Bugg.” And as for his chatterbox aunt, she’s about as vapid as Miss Bates from Emma, “an old maid runnin’ about like a hen with ’er ’ead cut off, an’ her tongue loose at both ends.”

As Humberstall continues to read Jane (the name by which he always refers to her), she gets under his skin and he goes from being an on-the-make Janeite to a true Janeite. In the wake of the bombardment, he is sneaked onto an overcrowded hospital train by a bony nurse who is so delighted to learn that he, too, is an Austen fan that she declares she’d happily kill a brigadier to make room for him. It is with great feeling, therefore, that he bestows on Jane the soldier’s highest accolade: “There’s no one to touch Jane when you’re in a tight place. Gawd bless ’er, whoever she was.”

This gauche “cart-horse of a man,” who lives with his mother and has never had a relationship with a woman, is an unlikely Janeite. With his working-class roots and cockney accent, he would be a misfit among the trendy, tea-drinking, Bath-visiting, costume-wearing, Regency-fetishizing Janeites of today. We don’t know what his politics are but it doesn’t really matter—and that is Kipling’s whole point. There is no one kind of Janeite; no one owns her.

There’s nothing new about trying to appropriate Austen politically. As Freya Johnston wrote recently in the Prospect, Austen has been repackaged down the years as “a radical, a prude and a saucepot, pro- and anti-colonial, a feminist and a downright bitch.” Did she acquiesce to the slave trade by not denouncing it in Mansfield Park, where the titular estate is owned by a sugar plantation owner? Or was she a covert abolitionist for naming it after the reformist judge Lord Mansfield who described slavery as “so odious”? One can’t be sure, and these debates will go on forever. There will always be those on the far left and far righ—the alt-right included—and others on the make who will try to refashion Austen in their own ideological image, but as Humberstall would no doubt assure us, the “old maid” doesn’t need protecting. She’d certainly scorn anything as fatuous as a safe space.

It should be a truth universally acknowledged that anyone at any point on the political spectrum can derive pleasure and laughter and wisdom from Austen’s sharp and beautiful prose, her moral plots, her sly humor, and her lethal insight into human nature. Take that one devastating line from Emma that so thoroughly exposes societal hypocrisy: “The stain of illegitimacy, unbleached by nobility or wealth, would have been a stain indeed.” As Humberstall says wonderingly, “some’ow Jane put it down all so naked it made you ashamed.”

Published in 1924, Kipling’s ode to “England’s Jane” was rendered all the more poignant by the tragic circumstances it had grown out of. In September 1915, after Kipling’s beloved son John went missing in action and was presumed dead, it was Austen’s novels that brought the grieving family some small measure of comfort. On those long and unbearable war evenings, after the slow drawing down of blinds, Kipling read aloud to his wife Carrie and their daughter, bringing them, in Carrie’s words “great delight.” Austen saw them through their “tight place” just as she would see Humberstall through his.

America is in a bit of a “tight place” of its own today. What better time to return to Jane Austen?

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10 Responses to Alt-Right Austen?

“Kipling, of course, is far too complex, compassionate, and protean a writer to be reduced to an alt-rightist.”

You clearly do not understand the complexity of the alt-right. We, like Kipling, are willing to see the good in individuals of other (non-white) races. We, like Kipling, are even willing to see the good points of other cultures, nations, and civilizations. What we are not willing to do is see our race/nation/culture deracinated into nothingness.

Nina Martyris makes a good point: “It should be a truth universally acknowledged that anyone at any point on the political spectrum can derive pleasure and laughter and wisdom from Austen’s sharp and beautiful prose, her moral plots, her sly humor, and her lethal insight into human nature.”

From the script of “You’ve Got Mail” (1998), written by Nora Ephron and Delia Ephron. Meg Ryan as Kathleen Kelly. Tom Hanks as Joe Fox:

[Cafe scene. DOOR OPENS] JOE: Kathleen Kelly. Hello. This is a coincidence. Would you mind if I sat down? KATHLEEN: Yes, I would, actually. I’m expecting someone. JOE: [he sees the book on her table and says] Pride and Prejudice. Do you mind? I bet you read that book every year. I bet you just love that…Mr. Darcy. Your sentimental heart beats wildly at the thought he and…whatever her name is are truly, honestly going to end up together. WAITER: Can I get you something? – No, he’s not staying. JOE: Mochaccino decaf, nonfat. KATHLEEN: You are not staying. JOE: I’ll just stay here until your friend gets here. Gee, is he late? KATHLEEN: The heroine of Pride and Prejudice is Elizabeth Bennet. She is a great and complex character. Not that you would know. JOE: As a matter of fact, I’ve read it. KATHLEEN: Oh, well, good for you. JOE: You’d discover a lot if you really knew me. KATHLEEN: I know what I’d find. Instead of a brain, a cash register. Instead of a heart, a bottom line. JOE: What? KATHLEEN: I just had a breakthrough. – JOE: What is it? KATHLEEN: For the first time, when confronted with a horrible, insensitive person…I knew exactly what I wanted to say, and I said it. JOE: You have a gift for it. That was a perfect blend of poetry and meanness.

(Scene at Kathleen’s apartment) JOE: I put you out of business so…you’re entitled to hate me. KATHLEEN: I don’t hate you. JOE: But you’ll never forgive me. – Just like Elizabeth. KATHLEEN: Who? JOE: Elizabeth Bennet in Pride and Prejudice. She was too proud. KATHLEEN: I thought you hated Pride and Prejudice. JOE: Or was she too prejudiced…and Mr. Darcy is too proud? I can’t remember. It wasn’t personal. KATHLEEN: What is that supposed to mean? I’m so sick of that. All that means is that it wasn’t personal to you. But it was personal to me. It’s personal to a lot of people. What is so wrong with being personal anyway? JOE: Nothing. KATHLEEN: Whatever else anything is, it ought to begin by being personal. My head is starting to get fuzzy. Why did you stop by again? I forget. JOE: I wanted to be your friend.

Possibly the only thing funnier than an “alt-rightist” trying desperately to justify their severe lack of melanin is an “alt-leftist” trying desperately to justify their not having enough. And obviously, “Sisterhood” only goes so far.

To echo Saint Paul, it matters not whether they preach Great Books out of love or hate, so long as the books get read. (

As an idealist, I continue to hope that reading the Great Books will produce non-bigoted individuals. But the lunatic fringe of the alt-left and the alt-right are hard nuts to crack.

My question is does the Alt – Right really exist? There seems to be no definition who they really are – pretty much anyone various leftists don’t like. It seems like a manufactured dread like Freemason conspiracies or the elders of Zion or the Tanaka Memorial. Within the loony Alt-Right conspiracy theory, it makes prefect sense that the members Alt-Right cabal are all tied by affection to Jane Austin and a secret religion where Pepe the Frog is a deity.

“Is Jane Austen an icon of America’s white-supremacist alliance? That was the startling assertion made in the Chronicle of Higher Education by Nicole Wright, an assistant professor of English at the University of Colorado. ”
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Do you think perhaps some of this silliness is just invented to keep professors’ names relevant?
And I suppose with Britain having an empire perhaps Jane Austen’s characters might have encountered a person of color or two, but if not- so what? Do we look at Indian, Chinese, Persian or Arabic lit. searching for white folks?
I had the pleasure of visiting Winchester Cathedral & seeing Jane Austen’s memorial there. They also have a wonderful tea room with very friendly church ladies serving, just to mention. Lovely place to visit & so is the surrounding countryside.

@Eric
“Right really exist? ” … not being a student of alt right, my guess is that it is an umbrella term for groups and individuals who’s various ideas are judged by the larger society as too malignant to be included.

I have never read a Jane Austen book and while tempted have never seen a Jane Austen adapted film. I did see a film of a group of women who had a Jane Austen book club or reading clatch. Given what I know, I found it hard to buy that a group of women who were having affairs, sleeping around actually comprehending Jane Austen, and if I recall one was in some same sex relational thing. But having never read Miss Austen’s work, maybe it’s quite possible its beyond my limited read of British classics.

But I have read Rudyard Kipling and I am a fan. I suspect that that the events of WWII granted Sir Kipling a reprieve of his views of Germans. And what is clear that is that he is paying no small respect to to iconic figures.

A lady of character and the everyday fighting man. A fit wedding given what has been presented and what I myself appreciate about Sir Kipling.

EliteCommInc. ,
I enjoy reading Rudyard Kipling, too. Especially his story about the Phantom Rickshaw.
Several years ago I had to be talked into watching “Sense & Sensibility” but was surprised to find I really liked it. Ditto for other Jane Austen stories made into films. Of course the beautiful scenery & costumes have something to do with it,too I think.